Google has a project to view and manage home electricity usage. This project would involve designing the hardware to measure the power usage and the Beagle software in interface with it. The Beagle would talk to the local home network via a wireless link and the home owner would configure the Beagle via a web page served on the Beagle.

Yannick Polius

Audio MBox

This project is mostly software, with the hardware element being the use of the dsp. The idea is to tie together three technologies: speech recognition, speech synthesis, and internet access in order to create an interface capable of orating information to the user based on a vocal command. The implementation I have in mind is to use the Pocket Sphinx speech recognition engine to first understand what the user wants through speech, such as "Rose-Hulman". Once the speech is translated, the software can execute a Wikipedia search to pull said item's page. Most of the important info is contained within the introductory paragraph, so the software will take only that chunk and feed it into the Flite speech synthesis engine. The end result is a simple machine with "mother box" like usability, that is, no interaction besides what is natural to the user (speaking) should be necessary to retrieve the information.

This project would simulate a hand-held chess game, and the game would allow two player games using two beagleboards over a network connection. The graphics would use the beagle's PowerVR SGX for hardware accelerated graphics by using OpenGL. In addition to 3D graphics and networking, a third portion of the project would be to optimize the boot time because a chess computer should start up quickly.

The goal of this project is to create a robot capable of competing in the 3.0 kg weight class of a sumo competition (an example). This would have minor hardware and electronics elements, but would focus on communication with sensors using the BeagleBoard and the Linux kernel. At minimum, this involves sensors to detect the edge of the ring and the opposing robot. This would likely be implemented using Sharp IR rangefinders, a ultrasonic rangefinders, and ideally a camera. Sumo rules.

Network based mp3 player. The Beagle will be programmed using a custom, protocol for transferring files from a network based server (x86 pc) to a Beagle. Speakers will be attached to the Beagle, where the file will be played back. Possible extensions are a LCD for displaying id3 tag information, and buttons for user interaction (next track, previous track, etc.) on the GPIO interface.

Sensory aware applications are becoming more mainstream with the release of the Apple iPhone. This project would combine both HW and SW to add sensory awareness to beagle. First, additional modules such as GPS, 3-axis accelerometers, Gyroscopes, Temperature Sensors, Humidity Sensors, Pressure Sensors, etc, would be added to beagle to compliment the microphone input in order to allow sensing of the real world environment. Then SW APIs would need to be layered on top to allow easy access to the sensory data for use by applications.